De Katpatuka a Jonanistan : el surgimiento, la muerte y la resurrección del griego de Capadocia

Abstract

This article sketches the linguistic and socio-cultural history of Cappadocia and the Cappadocians from the Hittite Empire in the Late Bronze Age until the population exchange between Greece and Turkey in 1923-1924. It describes the Hellenization of Cappadocia following Alexander's conquest of Asia Minor, including the long period of bilingualism involving the old Cappadocian language (probably Luwian or a related Anatolian language) and Cappadocian Greek. Already in Late Antiquity Cappadocian was considered a “barbarbic” version of Greek, but a much more dramatic transformation took place after the defeat of the Byzantine army by the Seljuk Turks at the battle of Manzikert (1071) and the subsequent conquest of Asia Minor. This resulted again in a long period of bilingualism during which the majority of the Cappadocians would eventually shift to Turkish. A minority of approximately 40% continued to speak Greek alongside Turkish, but the Greek was so heavily Turkicized that Cappadocian was incomprehensible and sounded like Turkish to other Greeks. After the population exchange, the Cappadocians were discriminated, because of their looks but especially because of their language, and as a result became increasingly reluctant to transmit their mother tongue to their children and grandchildren. In the 1980s it was generally believed that Cappadocian had become extinct until Mark Janse and Dimitris Papazachariou discovered that one particular Cappadocian dialect was still spoken to some extent in Greece. The recognition of Cappadocian as a bona fide language by academics turned out to be instrumental in the reversal of the negative language of the Cappadocians towards their own heritage language. The story of Cappadocian is thus another testimony of the social relevance of academic research in the humanities